Double Abecedarian: Email to a Young Poet, RE: Advice?
All right, listen up. First what you want to do is blend Ritz,
bananas and orange juice together until you get a creamy
consistency. Add ghost pepper hot sauce, Ex-Lax,
Diet Pepsi, gunpowder, a glass of gasoline and a dozen raw
eggs for protein. Blend again, and enjoy. I call it a Molotov
fruit smoothie because, like a Molotov cocktail or fu-
gu, it’s liable to kill you. Either way it’ll turn your butt-
hole into a flamethrower the next day when you pass gas.
If that sounds gross or dangerous, consider all the other
junk people (myself included) ingest: rubbery burgers from DQ,
Kentucky Fried Chicken, All You Can Eat pancakes at IHOP . . .
Look. The point I’m trying to make with all this mumbo jumbo
Molotov talk is that you have to learn to cope with pain.
Noxious amounts of it. And not temporarily, but ad infinitum.
Otherwise you risk becoming not a poet but a mental
patient who chops off his ear and drowns himself in drink.
Quit writing if you can’t handle a little gasoline and OJ.
Rejection will hurt more. Trust me. It’ll feel like a samurai
sword sodomizing your ego without lube. Van Gogh
took his own life it hurt him so bad. Preferred pushing
up daisies to living broke and unknown. RIP. So punch yourself
violently in the nuts. Give a sumo wrestler a piggyback ride.
Watch a beauty pageant while guzzling the aforementioned
XXX smoothie. Get used to pain to make rejection less tragic.
Young poet: good luck. I’d ramble on but I have a date with a sub-
zero walk-in freezer. Naked. I’m trying to contract pneumonia.
Double Abecedarian: 2007
At the time I was living in the lively town of Santa Cruz
between San Francisco and the more boring town of Monterey,
California. (I specify CA because there’s a Monterrey, MX—
double r, though.) People in those parts are slightly askew,
especially in Santa Cruz. I knew this dude who lived in an RV
for free in the woods illegally and read nothing but Thoreau,
Ginsberg and survival guides. He was a self-described pacifist/
hippie, though last I heard he’d joined the Marine Corps.
(Ironically he used to jack liquor from what he called “Traitor
Joe’s” because they supposedly supported the war in Iraq.)
Kooky vagrants, however, aren’t the only ones who shop-
lift booze in Santa Cruz: underage undergrads do too.
My freshman roommate, a potbellied pothead who lived on
nachos and Coors, had a fake ID that said he was a donor from
Olowalu, Hawaii. Off topic: did you know the Hawaiian al-
phabet has just thirteen letters!? Anyway, my perpetually drunk
quadruple-chinned roomie, who looked kind of like Ignatius J.
Reilly from the book A Confederacy of Dunces, tried to buy kiwi
strawberry vodka for a party but got caught like a prize fish,
the ID having flopped. Long story short he resorted to stealing.
Unfortunately I was making pretty shitty decisions myself,
virtually all of them involving drugs. Although I never did like
weed very much. I preferred pills and coke. Once I even snorted
Xanax while on ecstasy. But enough about college at UCSC.
You’re probably sick of listening to the red bird of my mouth blab,
zipping around my head. So as they say in Hawaii: aloha!
Double Abecedarian: A Brief History of My Life: Zero to Thirty
“There was I: a stinking adult.”
—John Ashbery
Although I tell people I’m from San Diego, I was actually born in Mesa, AZ
but moved when I was two. That was in 1990, before Internet pornography,
cell phones and social media gangbanged our lives, to say nothing of Netflix.
Don’t mind me. I’m just being my usual curmudgeonly self, a trait that grew
exponentially in adulthood. Specifically the first couple years, when an SUV
full of reality hit me. (For some reason I’m picturing a Tiffany blue Subaru.)
Generally speaking childhood was a blast. All I did was skate. But yeah, post-
high school was a shitshow. I went to UC Santa Cruz, did a bunch of drugs
(including one called sassafras), then dropped out and enrolled in a two-year
junior college where I took a remedial math class and learned to solve for q—
knowledge I didn’t care for, so dropped out again. Talk about a nincompoop.
Luckily I’ve never had trouble finding a job when I needed one. I’ve had so
many I can’t remember them all. I’ve worked at a gas station, a strip club, In-
N-Out Burger for a month (I got “terminated” for not showing enthusiasm
on top of eating fries while serving customers), plus dozens of random retail
places that didn’t require any skill. Throughout this time I was getting drunk
quite often. Like every day. I drank this mix of shit called jungle juice (aka JJ)
round-the-clock. Then fate introduced me to a book by Charles Bukowski.
Suddenly a sunlit valley opened up before me. It was like a giant light switch
turned on. I was filled with hope, excitement. A feeling I’d found my calling,
unprofitable as it was: poetry. Needless to say my early poems were knockoff
versions of Bukowski’s. Imitation crab meat. I even bought a dusty IBM type-
writer because that’s what he used to use but the apparently popular s, e and
x keys were broken. To fast-forward (I’m spent), I met une jeune fille du Québec,
yielded to her advice to stop drinking and start eating, quit my dead-end job
zapping roaches and a decade later got an—ahem—incredibly lucrative MFA.
Double Abecedarian: X Marks the G-Spot
“I gave a horse a blowjob.”
—Grant Quackenbush
Abecedarians annoy the shit out of me. To go from A to Z
because that’s what the form demands is, in a word, crazy.
Can’t poets find anything better to do than write complex
doggerel no one gives a damn about but them? I mean how
egotistical do you have to be? Answer: Very with a capital V.
Forgive me if I seem insensitive. It’s just that frivolous froufrou
gets on my nerves. Speaking of poetry that makes me petulant,
have you read Grant Quackenbush? Don’t. He’s atrocious.
I produce sweeter verse from my ass. But seriously, I’d rather
jam a fork in my eye than be forced to read that hack GQ.
Kanye West—now there’s a poet. Well, if you consider rap
lyrics poetry, which you’d have to be a total moron not to.
Music, after all, is akin to poetry. One could say it’s its twin.
(Note that lyric comes from lyre and rhyme from rhythm.)
Others agree. Bob Dylan, you may recall, won the Nobel
Prize in Literature in 2016. But I digress. Back to that quack
Quackenbush. I heard from a source he gave a horse a BJ.
Raunchy? Yes. Really? Eh. Honesty isn’t my modus operandi.
Some of you might be wondering why I’m talking so much
trash. To reiterate: I despise Grant’s writing. It makes me gag.
Urinary tract infections are more appealing than the decaf
vanilla piss he passes off as poetry. He should call up Kanye
West, solicit his advice. Write a poem in his honor called
“X Marks the G-Spot.” I don’t know. Something eccentric
“Ye” would approve of. As long as it’s not one of those dumb,
zany double abecedarians of his. They’re worse than diarrhea.
